... State water-quality professionals developing new biological assessment methods often have difficulty relating assessment results to narrative criteria in water-quality standards. An alternative to selecting index thresholds arbitrarily is to include the Biological Condition Gradient (BCG) in the development of the assessment method. The BCG describes tiers of biological community condition to help ...

... The factors that determine species' range limits are of central interest to biologists. One particularly interesting group comprises odonates (dragonflies and damselflies), which show large differences in secondary sexual traits and respond quickly to climatic factors, but often have minor interspecific niche differences, challenging models of niche‐based species coexistence. We quantified the env ...

... The need to consider in captureârecapture models random effects besides fixed effects such as those of environmental covariates has been widely recognized over the last years. However, formal approaches require involved likelihood integrations, and conceptual and technical difficulties have slowed down the spread of captureârecapture mixed models among biologists. In this article, we evaluate ...

... A key innovation in leaf evolution is the acquisition of a flat lamina with adaxial–abaxial polarity, which optimizes the primary function of photosynthesis. The developmental mechanism behind leaf adaxial–abaxial polarity specification and flat lamina formation has long been of interest to biologists. Surgical and genetic studies proposed a conceptual model wherein a signal derived from the shoot ...

... Since Darwin’s pioneering research on plant reproductive biology (e.g. Darwin 1877), understanding the mechanisms maintaining the diverse sexual strategies of plants has remained an important challenge for evolutionary biologists. In some species, populations are sexually polymorphic and contain two or more mating morphs (sex phenotypes). Differences in morphology or phenology among the morphs inf ...

... The genetic code serves as one of the natural links for life’s two conceptual frameworks—the informational and operational tracks—bridging the nucleotide sequence of DNA and RNA to the amino acid sequence of protein and thus its structure and function. On the informational track, DNA and its four building blocks have four basic variables: order, length, GC and purine contents; the latter two exhib ...

... 1.âWith worldâwide changes in human land use, an important challenge for conservation biologists is to develop frameworks to predict how species will respond to landscape change. Environmental filtering, where different environments favour different speciesâ traits, has the potential to be a useful predictive framework. Therefore, it is important to advance our understanding of how species w ...

... The Per Brinck Foundation at the editorial office of the journal Oikos and Wiley/Blackwell Publishing annually awards the Per Brinck Oikos Award in honor of the Swedish ecologist Professor Per Brinck, who has played an instrumental role for the development and recognition of the science of ecology in the Nordic countries, especially as serving as the Editor‐in‐Chief for Oikos for many years. The P ...

... The terms âshoalâ, âswarmâ and âschoolâ are very frequently used in research on collective behaviours in animals. Pitcherâs definitions are accepted as the authority in the field but are based on a conceptual criterion of sociability. Without call into question the basis of these definitions, they do not provide tools to determine these behaviours quantitatively. To compare studies b ...

... Urban green spaces are potentially important to biodiversity conservation because they could provide patches of high quality habitat or connectivity to nearby habitat. Presence-only species distribution models (SDMs) represent a potential tool for assessing the biodiversity value of urban green space; however, there is limited research to validate SDM results with field surveys to see if the predi ...

... Ecologists and conservation biologists seem increasingly attracted to sophisticated modelling approaches, sometimes at the expense of attention to data quality and appropriateness of fieldwork design. This dissociation may lead to a loss of perspective promoting biological unrealities as conclusions, which may be used in conservation applications. We illustrate this concern by focusing on recent a ...

... 1. Saproxylic beetles are a key group when assessing forest biodiversity, and biologists have been trying to explore their ecological requirements. 2. We studied Cucujus cinnaberinus in its recent stronghold (i.e. Czech Republic, Central Europe). 3. Our analyses using a generalised linear model (GLZ) revealed that sufficient sun exposure was the most important habitat parameter at the tree level a ...

... Engineering higher photosynthetic efficiency for greater crop yields has gained significant attention among plant biologists and breeders. To achieve this goal, manipulation of metabolic targets and canopy architectural features has been heavily emphasized. Given the substantial variations in leaf anatomical features among and within plant species, there is large potential to engineer leaf anatomy ...

... Increasingly, animal biologists are taking advantage of low cost micro-sensor technology, by deploying accelerometers to monitor the behavior and movement of a broad range of species. The result is an avalanche of complex tri-axial accelerometer data streams that capture observations and measurements of a wide range of animal body motion and posture parameters. Analysis of these parameters enables ...

... Lateral organ distribution at the shoot apical meristem defines specific and robust phyllotaxis patterns that have intrigued biologists and mathematicians for centuries. In silico studies have revealed that this self-organizing process can be recapitulated by modeling the polar transport of the phytohormone auxin. Phyllotactic patterns change between species and developmental stages, but the proce ...

... The individuals of a species are not equal. These differences frustrate experimental biologists and ecotoxicologists who wish to study the response of a species (in general) to a treatment. In the analysis of data, differences between model predictions and observations on individual animals are usually treated as random measurement error around the true response. These deviations, however, are mai ...

... Biological assemblies and machines often elude structural characterization, hampering our understanding of how they function, how they evolved, and how they can be modulated. A number of macromolecular assemblies have been reconstructed over the years by piecemeal efforts, such as fitting high-resolution crystal structures of individual components into lower-resolution electron microscopy (EM) rec ...

... The intrinsic rate of increase (rm) has been considered as an important indicator of fitness in terrestrial ectotherms since long. It is actually an equivalent to the instantaneous growth rate of the exponential equation for describing the density-independent population growth. In terrestrial ectotherms, rm has been demonstrated to be temperature-dependent. The temperature at which rm was maximal, ...